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MINISTERIE VAN ONDERWIJS
EN VOLKSONTWIKKELING
UNIFORM EINDEXAMEN VWO 2008
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18 JULI 2008
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Text I:
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How Brazil Reversed the Curse
Way back in the 1970s, when Brazil's economy seemed unstoppable, South America's biggest
nation earned a disparaging nickname: Bel-india. Society, by this metaphor, was divided into two
lopsided parts—a petite and prosperous Belgium surrounded by a vast and destitute India. The
underlying meaning was hard to miss. While the overall economy boomed, only a tiny elite was
blessed. So Brazil rose to become one of the top 10 economies—and one of the most unequal
societies—in the world.
Now Brazil may need a new metaphor. One of the most reliably abysmal1 income gaps in the
world has finally started to shrink, and it may herald a region-wide shift. Thanks to a complex
cocktail of economic gains such as the end of chronic high (at times hyper-) inflation and
plummeting interest rates, soaring enrollments in primary schools and, more recently, plenty of
well-targeted cash handouts going directly to the poorest households (bypassing wasteful welfare
bureaucracies), Brazil managed to slash the number of people living on $2 a day or less from
about 36 percent in 1992 to just over 19 percent last year. Now the gaping divide between
Brazil's haves and have-nots, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is also starting to narrow.
Brazil's fell by 5 percent from 2001 to 2006. So have Mexico's and, more modestly, Chile's over
the past decade—thanks largely to the same mix of anti-poverty strategies. So rapidly have
fortunes turned that Brazil is being hailed by some analysts as an unlikely bellwether for fighting
poverty policies worldwide. "The '90s were the years of economic stabilization," says economist
Marcelo Neri of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, a Brazilian business school. "This decade is
going to be remembered as the era of falling inequality."
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abysmal: extremely large, bad, terrible
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Once again experts are asking why. Boilerplate economics deserves part of the credit. While the
Latin American Street may grumble over "neoliberals," it was free-market reforms that helped
break down a long-encrusted social order that grated especially against the poor. Greater fiscal
responsibility curbed compulsive government borrowing, bringing down interest rates and
encouraging lenders to spread credit to even low-income consumers, long written off as
unbankable. Chronic high inflation was practically eliminated by the mid-'90s, ending one of the
more pernicious taxes on the poor; while governments could be refinanced through bonds that
paid just a bit more than the inflation rate, workers watched helplessly while their cash wages
melted in their pockets. "There is clearly now much stronger political commitment to
macroeconomic stability and keeping inflation low," says Anoop Singh, head of the International
Monetary Fund's Western Hemisphere department. "This is good news for bringing down both
poverty and inequalities."
Policymakers also did their part through massive campaigns in the 1990s to get children out of
the workplace and into the classroom. Brazil, for example, had 97 percent of school-age kids in
the classroom as early as a decade ago; those students are now being rewarded with better jobs.
But one of the most celebrated government initiatives is a new brand of grant to the extremely
poor known in policy terms as conditional cash transfers (CCTs). All turn on the same principle
of paying a small stipend—say, $10 to $50 per month—to the poorest families on condition that
they keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups at the local health clinic.
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The most rigorous of the CCT schemes is the decade-old Chile Solidario, which awards small
two-year grants to families who must not only keep their children in school but also report to
social workers and look for jobs. Mexico's Oportunidades, begun in 2002, tracks the progress of
some 5 million families on a sophisticated computer database, which has caught the attention of
officials from Ankara to New York. After a visit to Mexico, New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg launched his own version, Opportunity NYC, last March. The grandest scheme by far
is Brazil's Bolsa Família, or the Family Stipend, which gives some 11.1 million families—nearly
a quarter of the 183 million population—up to $50 a month for an unspecified period. (Officials
are still debating a cutoff point.) Several stipend programs had been launched in the mid-'90s but
they were unified and spread across Brazil after 2003, under the government of Luiz Inácio Lula
da Silva.
Economists generally applaud targeted cash transfers on the ground that paying the poor to
improve their own lot is far more efficient than throwing money at top-heavy poverty-relief
bureaucracies. It is also far cheaper. A textbook case is Brazil, where the government spends
more than $500 billion, close to half its GDP, on social programs such as the loss-making
pension system that mostly benefits the nonpoor. "With Bolsa Família you reach a quarter of the
population by spending just 1 percent of GDP," says Neri. "That's a far better deal." Because of
its sharper focus on the poor, Bolsa Família was just as effective in lowering Brazilian inequality
as the massive pension system, at only a fifth the cost, Neri says.
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Not everyone agrees, of course. In the wrong hands, aid can easily turn into an old-fashioned
populist handout. Nicaragua's Zero Hunger project gives families a cow and three chickens,
which is unlikely to change lives, while studies show Brazilian leaders crank up the stipend
awards around election time. More worrisome, much less attention has been paid to getting
people off the stipend. "There's something wrong when 50 million people are getting income
transfers," says economist Eduardo Giannetti of Ibmec, a São Paulo business school. "I fear that
Bolsa Família is being sold as a way of life and not as an emergency aid program." Skeptics also
point out that the rising poor may sink again if the Brazilian economy softens and the
government supply of cash dries up.
Longer-term, transforming society will take much more. "We have to improve education in order
to see a real reduction in inequality," says Naércio Menezes, an education specialist at Ibmec. If
not, critics warn, globalization can actually worsen the opportunity gap. "As countries grow
faster and globalize, there's going to be increasing demand for people with tech skills. Unless the
education system is geared to meeting those needs, you'll [find] that the benefits will go to a
narrow group of people, and inequality will increase," says the IMF's Singh. And Bel-india will
re-emerge.
Monica Campbell © 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Text II:
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New Oil Crisis: An Engineer Shortage
You've heard the reasons for high oil prices: instability in the Middle East, booming demand in
China and India, the sagging dollar. Now add another one to the list: Engineers. The world
doesn't have enough of them. From Alberta to Azerbaijan, the fervent hunt for new reserves of
oil and natural gas is running up against a shortage of experienced oil patch professionals. "We
anticipate a 10 to 15% shortfall" in the number of veteran engineers and project managers needed
to lead the search for new energy supplies, says Candida Scott, director of cost research at
Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
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This comes as no surprise to people inside the industry. Membership in the Society of Petroleum
Engineers has been graying for most of the past decade. Two-thirds of the membership is over
40. More than half of all oil-field professionals will reach retirement age during the next decade,
according to CERA's calculations. Meanwhile, the low oil prices of the 1990s turned many
petroleum engineering schools into near ghost towns.
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With prices at near record highs, projects to extract hard-to-reach oil and gas are suddenly viable.
But only if there are engineers and scientists to design the deep-water platforms, conduct the
advanced seismology, route the new pipelines and so on. Complex projects take longer to build
and put a premium on experience — at precisely the time that veteran managers and engineers
are passing from the ranks.
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American companies are responding to the shortage by opening design shops in Southeast Asia,
where engineering graduates are more plentiful (though often inexperienced). Still, according to
CERA's calculations, the supply of oil-and-gas professionals is stretched to the limit and can't
keep pace with the long list of ambitious new projects planned for the next five years.
The University of Wyoming, which shut down its undergraduate program in petroleum
engineering in 1997 due to lack of interest, revived the program last year. And colleges are
clamoring for teaching staff: the Colorado School of Mines website, for example, is advertising
for petroleum engineering professors at every level, from first-year assistants to candidates for
endowed chairs.
The brainpower shortage means these projects will cost more and take longer to complete, thus
contributing to the high price of energy — great news if you happen to be an aspiring engineer.
By graduation day last spring at the Colorado School of Mines, every student completing a
petroleum engineering degree had already found a job — and most had their pick of competing
offers. Starting salaries for undergraduate degree-holders range from $70,000 to $85,000,
according to several sources, while engineers with graduate degrees command six figures. The
average salary and benefits package for experienced oil professionals in the U.S. is over
$160,000, a survey of SPE members recently found. Last year alone, average salaries rose more
than 8%.
"Starting salaries for recent petroleum engineering graduates are the highest of any engineering
profession," says Mark Rubin, executive director of the SPE, which has programs to encourage
students as young as grade school to set their sights on the energy business. "In addition to the
high pay," Rubin continued, "the work is exciting and high-tech — the oil and gas industry uses
more computing power and data than any other industry except the military. An engineer sitting
in a control room in Houston can steer a drill bit from a platform off the coast of Africa into an
area the size of an average bedroom."
But a shortage years in the making will not be cured overnight. Scott estimates that a young
engineer needs eight years of experience to prepare for a lead role on a major project — even
more to master deep-sea drilling. New mentoring programs are being developed to try to speed
up the seasoning process, but that won't solve a problem that is right here, right now. Says Scott,
"A problem the industry has known about for years is coming home to roost."
By DAVID VON DREHLE; adapted from Time, November 20, 2007
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Text III:
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Tattoo Bans
There are two things Ed Soares is devoted to. One is his job as a detective for the East Palo
Alto, Calif., police department, where he has worked for five years. The other is a large
garish tattoo of St. Michael casting the devil into hell that adorns his forearm. The image is a
work in progress, and Soares, 33, has spent three years and $5,000 getting it just the way he
wants it. So he faced something of a test of allegiances this summer when the department
forbade all its officers from displaying tattoos on the job. "It is not fair. I have spent a lot of
time and money on my tattoos," says Soares. "But I am in the business of taking orders, so
that is what I will do."
East Palo Alto's prohibition may seem like a quirky, isolated incident but in fact is a sign of
the times. Over the past six months, tattoo restrictions have been imposed on at least a dozen
police departments around the country, and the Marine Corps placed a ban on "excessive
body art" for new recruits on April 1. Oddly, the crackdown is occurring at a time when
large, excessive tattoos are more popular than ever. Last year a study published in the Journal
of the American Academy of Dermatology found that 89% of the men and 48% of the
women who wear tattoos have conspicuous and sometimes outlandish designs on their hands,
necks, arms, legs, toes and feet. "We are seeing more tattoos than ever before," says Ronald
Davis, chief of police at East Palo Alto, where officers are required to hide their ink with
clothing or bandages.
Since the Stone Age, tattooing has been seen as a spiritual ritual, used to mark a right of
passage. During the Civil War, getting a flag emblazoned on the arm emerged as a patriotic
symbol for soldiers. But in the past few years, the garish body-art trend has taken on an
increasingly negative connotation as it has become a signifying mark of street gangs and
prison inmates.
The East Palo Alto ban was sparked by community complaints about a group of officers,
known as the "Wolf Pack," who wore tattoos of the animal. "The uniform needs to reek of
professionalism," says Larry Harmel, executive director of the Maryland Chiefs of Police
Association. Several departments in his state have already initiated bans. "People can draw
negative conclusions by looking at big, bold tattoos."
Few organizations are more committed to the image of professionalism than the Marine
Corps. "Marines hold themselves to a higher standard than everyone else," says Sergeant
Major Carlton Kent. Although new recruits can't enter the service with sleeves, as large inked
designs are often called, Marines already in the Corps can keep the body art they have. But a
commanding officer must document those tattoos to make sure nothing is added. "My tattoos
express who I am," says Sergeant Adam Esquivel, a Marine serving at Camp Pendleton, near
Oceanside, Calif. But he's resolved to follow the new order. "I chose to be a Marine. So I
have to take the good with the bad."
But does it make sense for the Corps to take such a stiff stand on an aesthetic issue at a time
when the nation is at war and it's already tough enough to persuade young people to enlist in
the military? Marine officials claim the new policy isn't hurting recruitment. But it is telling
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that last year the Army relaxed a similar tattoo policy to help bolster its numbers. There are
no statistics indicating what effect the bans have had on law-enforcement hiring, but there is
evidence that cops aren't happy. A few months ago, the police-officers union in Anne
Arundel County, Md., filed a grievance against the department. So far the courts have been
staunchly antitattoo. Last year a federal appeals court in Hartford, Conn., upheld a ruling that
required officers to cover up spiderweb tattoos--a symbol of white supremacy--setting a
precedent that such ordinances do not violate the First Amendment.
But departments like East Palo Alto are banning not just tats that are racially offensive--they
are prohibiting them all. "Tattoos are an icebreaker," says Soares, who thinks society is
generally accepting of tattoos. "Civilians know we are normal people, not robots."
By CAROLYN SAYRE; from TIME; October 25, 2007
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QUESTION SHEET
Answer the questions in complete sentences using your own words as far as possible
Text I:
How Brazil Reversed the Curse
1. Explain the metaphor in paragraph 1. (ll. 1-6: Way back … world.)
2. How did Brazil manage to reduce the huge income gap?
3. What are Conditional Cash Transfers?
4. Explain why economists are usually in favor of cash transfers.
5. Why are skeptics opposed to CCTs?
6. What is the ultimate solution to the income divide, as expressed in the last paragraph?
(ll. 68-74: Longer- term … re-emerge.)
Text II:
New Oil Crisis: An Engineer Shortage
7. Explain what caused the petroleum engineer shortage.
8. What has been done to fill the need for petroleum engineers?
9. In which way does the petroleum engineer gap affect the oil crisis?
10. Is it easy, according to Scott, to make up for the engineer shortage? Account for your
answer.
Text III:
Tattoo Bans
11. Explain why detective Ed Soares faced a test of allegiances this summer.
12. Which contrast is expressed in paragraph 3? (ll. 19-23: Since ... inmates.)
13. What led to the ban of tattoos in the East Palo Alto police department?
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